Architecting climate change data infrastructure for Nevada

Abstract

The NSF EPSCoR-funded Nevada Climate Change Project seeks to create a central, reusable, extensible infrastructure that can be used to collect geospatial climate data and information. Housing climate data for Nevada and its surrounding regions during the initial construction phases, the newly created system (with its central component: the Nevada Climate Change Portal) will ultimately be capable of storing any kind of geospatial data for multiple types of research, education and outreach activities. In order to meet the varied needs of the climate researchers, educators, students, and policy makers involved in the project, it was necessary to research and implement a new system architecture. The novelty of this architecture is that it addresses, in an extensible and robust manner, the end-to-end needs of all project stakeholders, implementing multiple sub-levels of architectural design that incorporate data acquisition from sensor networks, data storage using high-performance geospatially-enabled databases, asset tracking and management to improve data validation and verification, metadata collection and management, data curation, and advanced web-based data management and retrieval. The paper describes the proposed system architecture, discusses the major design challenges encountered, addresses some implementation points, and highlights the capabilities of the Nevada Climate Change Portal. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.